New to this forum, had to register so I could respond to this, hoping the moderator is unbiased.
What the hell?
Ok first off. Doraymon, I assume you mean optical as in SPDIF or similar? because if not, then I think you must have misunderstood something. If you mean that your laptop is taking in pulses of light, like a fibre-optic connection would, and on it's own converting it into data, and that is improving your DAC's audio output, then, really, no offense meant, but all hope is lost.
Speaking with experience amounting to 10 years of music production life coupled with 5, soon 6 years of electronics engineering, the AQVox ethernet switch does nothing, and is a scam. Absolutely nothing about it is improved, except the physical sturdyness which I assume is an accidental byproduct of all the superglue, hot glue and resin compound they added all over the thing.
No components have been swapped out for improved ones in the board, solder jobs have clearly been re-done on the connectors (likely to accompany their own branded overpriced cables while excluding everything else, and the joints are brittle and not anywhere close to professional. That's it. That's all they did, except add in an extra IC that in it's current configuration literally doesn't do anything, and swapping out the xtal for a cheaper one. Under analysis, practically every component introduces more (not less) noise than the ones on the base model, and I consistently encountered bit-loss and checksum errors when analyzing the chain, more so than on the base model they've used.
Not to mention the fact that all of this should have been obvious to anyone who thought twice about it. This is TCP we're talking about. It goes through error-correction, jittercompensation, delay compensation, buffers, and it's even goddamn encrypted. No matter how hard you try, you literally can't make improvements to it that you couldn't by just getting a decent ethernet switch from a reputable brand, which AQvox absolutely isn't. They're hated by practically everyone of note in both the music industry, and in all engineering communities I've managed to find it talked about in.
And that's not even getting into their marketing, which is filled with outright plain lies, and now there's a pending class action lawsuit coming their way because of it. (which is good news though because you guys can get your money back with interest when, not if, it succeeds.)
But seriously. I can't stress this enough. The components are WORSE. they made the base model WORSE, and slapped a 3000% price increase on it while lying in their marketing. It's more outrageous than if they had just straight up not shipped it to anyone who ordered it.
Buy the base model, if you have the AQvox one, open both up and see for yourself. If you have an oscilloscope you can really see for yourself. This is a scam, and the fact that placebo has worked so well on you guys is a testament to how low this company has fallen in order to extort money out of people who don't know better. I don't blame you guys for falling for it, but I do blame you for defending it when challenged about it.
